It may almost be called an appalling fact
that for at least two centuries--from 1700 to 1900--not a single
blank-verse play was produced which lives, or deserves to live,[2] on
the stage of to-day.
I have thus glanced at the history of the blank-verse play because I
believe that it can never revive until we clearly realize and admit that
it is, and has been for a century, thoroughly dead, while, for a century
before that again, it was only galvanized into a semblance of life by a
great school of rhetorical acting. The playwright who sets forth with
the idea that, in writing a poetical drama, he is going to continue the
great Elizabethan tradition, is starting on a wild-goose chase. The
great Elizabethan tradition is an incubus to be exorcised. It was
because Mr. Stephen Phillips was not Elizabethanizing, but clothing a
vital and personal conception of drama in verse of very appealing
lyrical quality, that some of us thought we saw in _Paolo and Francesca_
the dawn of a new art.
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